This Camera is Made of 23,248 Coffee Stirrers, an NES Controller, and LEGOs
Here’s one of the more unique cameras you’ll ever see: designer Adrian Hanft took 28,248 coffee stirrer straws and turned them into a one-of-a-kind camera — the images show up as 28,248 points of light.
Light passes through the tens of thousands of stirrer straws and creates an image on “ground glass” — Hanft tried things like a laptop screen and sanded plexiglass before settling on wax paper — and a digital camera mounted on the back end captures the image seen on the “ground glass.”
Hanft built a series of prototypes with different straw counts and designs, with the size of the camera growing as the project evolved:
The final design has a 1/2-inch plywood body, measures 21x21x31 inches (53x53x79cm), and weighs 40 pounds (18kg). The 23,248 stirrers are split straws (i.e. two tiny straws attached side-by-side), so the camera features a resolution of 0.0465 megapixels.
A Raspberry Pi inside serves as the brains of the camera (running custom Python code written by Hanft), and it’s paired with a 12.3-megapixel (and 6mm focal length) Raspberry Pi camera module on a homemade LEGO mount.
Controlling the camera is done through an original Nintendo controller attached via a USB adapter. Pressing ‘Start’ provides a preview of what the camera sees, pressing ‘A’ snaps a photo, pressing ‘Select’ displays a gallery of past photos, ‘Up’ and ‘Down’ increase and decrease exposure time in 1-second increments (respectively), and ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ is for browsing the gallery. Hanft’s phone is used as the camera’s display as a wireless monitor.
Here are some sample photos captured using the camera:
“It sounds like a joke, but I actually take it pretty seriously,” Hanft tells PetaPixel. “People tell me they think pictures taken with my coffee stirrer camera feel more like paintings than photos. The effect is like a mashup of Chuck Close, Claude Monet, and an 8-bit video game.”
Hanft has documented the year-old process of arriving at this camera over on Medium.
You can find more of Hanft’s work on his website and Instagram.
Update on 2/1/23: Hanft has released a video showing how the camera works:
